The Shadow Line

[sebastienne]

The Shadow Line - is anybody else watching this?

The show is demanding that I engage with so much - plot, character, the philosophy of identity - that I'm almost consciously rebelling. I know that I shouldn't - it's so rare and wonderful for me to find a TV show this honestly compelling - but I do find myself predicting spin-offs to lighten the mood:


1. Jay Wratten & Bob Harris' rent boy (who probably has a name, but I seem to have forgotten it just now..) have been masterminding the whole thing. At the end of episode 7 they will escape, and buy themselves a small Caribbean island with their ill-gotten gains. They then proceed to have lots and lots of sex.

2. As 1. above, only the fit policeman joins them. He has a name too, I think, and it's not just "Rani's dad from the Sarah Jane Adventures".

3. As 2. above, only Jonah Gabriel's cop-partner's real name turns out to be Dorothy McShane. She follows them to the Caribbean island, and there is a fantastic action sequence where she goes all Marine Corps and breaks in at night past incredible security. You think she's going to kill them all in their sleep (or during a fantastic orgy - this is post-watershed after all) but in fact she just captures them, threatens them with beautiful torture, and extracts just enough money & information to Put Things Right for surviving family members etc.

4. As 3. above, only she isn't fob-watched; she uses the information, the money, and her TARDIS to turn all the deaths into disappearances, and to give everyone who has died in the last six episodes exciting new lives.


..so mostly I'm drawing the conclusion that I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near gritty, realistic drama.

Comments

[gavagai]

<3<3<3

I've only watched the first two episodes so far. The filming is beautiful, but I had a lot of problems/annoyances with what felt like a mismatch between the "realistic, gritty BBC crime drama" setup and the incredibly non-naturalistic dialogue. The characters don't really seem to have their own voices (apart from Rafe Spall's character's Spurious Scariness) and I have a short fuse for the number of people speaking in precisely modulated, apparently pre-meditated paragraphs with a sprinkling of apt metaphors about lines and possibly shadows.

But like I say, I've only seen the first couple of episodes, Ejiofor and Eccleston are always worth watching, and having grown up with my dad's collection of Cold War psychological dramas automatically gives me a certain affinity for this kind of thing. I really should catch up with it in time for the finale!

[sebastienne]

Ooh, that's interesting - I was getting irritated by the number of speeches like that in episode 5 or 6, but hadn't noticed it was a theme all along.

[gavagai]

Yep - on consideration, I tihnk it's something I would find irritating any way, but I wonder if I would have found it less of a mismatch of style if it had been more frequently reviewed and described in the runup to its release as a noir/conspiracy thriller rather than The Wire: UK? Because those seem to be far more appropriate labels stylistically, and I'm really quite irked by the Wire comparisons even if they're an easy way to get attention.

[sebastienne]

I never actually saw any of the Wire - or any of the comparisons to it, I so suck at popular culture - but even I can see that's an inappropriate comparison, yes. "Contains some drugs and some people of colour" is pretty much all they have in common, right?

[gavagai]

Yes! I actually took a sentence to that effect out of my last comment for fear of being Just Too Cynical.

Well, it's also notable for looking at the War On Drugs and post-industrial decay from multiple perspectives within a city (police and criminals in the first series, steadily expanding thereafter), which is something TSL is also selling itself on in a much tighter and more restricted narrative, but the style of the visuals and dialogue and basically everything are just a completely different thing. Not in a bad way! Just a different thing, I would hate for people to think the only way of doing a crime drama was to try and rewrite The Wire even though I love it masses and masses. From my eye on TV columns reviewers mostly seemed to stop those comparisons after the first episode or two when it became obvious how shallow they were, though people are still going strong in the Guardian comments sections about how it's NOT AS GOOD AS THE WIRE. Aren't they ever.

[happydork]

I'm rooting for Gatehouse! I hope he wins and manages to cover up / control everything. :)

[notintheseheels.livejournal.com]

I'd not seen it, but a cursory google tells me it has Chiwetel Ejiofor and Christopher Eccleston in it, so to the iPlayer I go!